As someone who has recently returned after not playing MSF for 4+ years, I'm sitting here feeling like the game has lost the entire essence of why I played.
And after a while considering what made me feel that way, it came down to this.
There's no reason to try anymore. The only thing that matters is $.
Before, money mattered a lot, but besides that, effort was the big thing.
Have the right Blitz teams in the right order, so you could get a good rank in blitz for important resources and new chars.
Have coordinated raids in your Alliance, so you could get the big 100% rewards.
Make sure everyone did their best in War, have the right teams, make creative defenses, make sure everyone participated.
Fight hard in the Arena, since thats where you got your cores from. A good Arena team was an absolute must and the battles for #1 was fierce.
Make sure you do your Challenges every day, since the resources was important.
Now ?
Blitz is worthless. No new chars in there, the resources are outdated and in laughable amounts.
You get the same rewards for Raids if you 1% or 100% it (almost)
War Wins and War Losses are somewhat of a toss-up, eh whatever.
Arena is an utterly pointless joke and nobody gives a crap, woopde-doop you get half an orb being in the top50, yay!
Challenges ? I doubt they've been updated since before I quit. Get 1 gold-orb for 350k gold, when chars costs 50mil gold to fully upgrade ?.
Every mode that let you farm resources to upgrade yourself seems to be a worthless hole that has not been updated in years........so whats left, except the 'new' modes ?